This is going to sound very Shirley MacLaine, but I feel so comfortable in the nineteenth century when I’m writing, that I have to wonder. Many times I jump on the internet to fact check something I’m writing, and find that I’m spot on correct. How do I know this stuff? Why does it sound so familiar as I’m writing?
For a number of years, at the insistence of my editor, I switched from writing historical romance to contemporary romance. I had fun writing the stories, but I didn’t feel so connected to the characters in these books. Now I have taken a big step to return to the past, and I am loving it. I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed the period of the last quarter of the nineteenth century until I went back, figuratively speaking.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. As a child I always had a fantasy about time travel, even before I watched the 1960 movie version of H. G. Wells Time Machine with Rod Taylor--who was pretty hot--over and over and over.
I used to day dream about hearing the Gettysburg Address in person then having dinner with Abraham Lincoln, seeing the World’s Fair in Chicago, and sailing the Atlantic on a steam ship and having tea with Queen Victoria.
So--do our souls return time after time? Who knows? But it would explain a lot :-)
Just last blog I talked about getting ideas. It happened yesterday--and was a little like a bolt from the blue. I was getting ready to go to an outdoor concert and had NPR on the radio. Garrison Keeler had a guest musician on who was doing a lovely old song that sounded like it came from the Civil War era. A line in the song was about the widows and sweethearts left behind, and blam! Just like that I got an idea for not one book, but a series.
What happened to all those women who loved men who didn’t come home from war?
What if they formed a social club that evolved into a sisterhood and what if some of them decided or were forced by circumstances to become mail order brides?
Ta da--more books.
I just had a friend ask me where I get my ideas for a story. This question comes up a lot, and when it does, I know the person asking is not a fiction writer and will never be one. Any one who writes fiction will tell you that ideas just pop into your brain, even when you don’t want or need them.
They sneak up on you when you are trying to grocery shop or when your husband is telling you about his latest fishing trip. They worm their way into your brain like little parasites and try to take your attention away from the characters in your current work. Some are very persistent and refuse to leave you alone.
When that happens I will write the idea down on a piece of scratch paper and toss it into a basket on my desk--you know, the one that is filled with layers of ‘stuff you will get to later’. Then, every six months or so I go through the basket and find these cryptic one liners like: ‘a woman artist who moves to a small town when she begins to lose her eyesight’ or ‘a princess from a foreign country goes incognito’.
Sometimes they make no sense at all and I don’t even remember writing them down, but the process kills the brain worms. I cannot begin to explain the slip of paper that reads ‘Yodeling dog, man with six fingers and girl who is looking for a job in a mortuary’.
Writers have very strange brains.
The ideas come easily. Writing the book is the hard part.
The main character in the book I’m working on is a woman who is forced to accept a job as a governess. She has no experience with children and is a rather repressed woman. I think of her as ‘The Librarian’--so it seemed natural for her to seek out a book on child rearing to help her do her job. I researched books on child rearing and found one written in 1831 by a woman named--wait for it--Mrs. Child. I expected it to be a completely outdated theory of child raising, you know the ‘children should be heard but not seen era’, but it was amazingly current. Lots of talk of teaching children kindness and manners through example. Well, there was that one little passage where she disapproves of locking children in closets and recommends tying them to a chair instead, but all in all, very modern!
I love to research and find that I will get lost in it and ignore my writing, so I decided my character had just one book available, instead of me trying to do a master’s thesis on child rearing in the 19th century.
I’m writing a scene that takes place during a cold Spring day after a long winter in Buffalo. I’m guessing at what it must be like to see that first crocus poke up through the snow. This is a stretch for me because I have always lived in Southern California and I can look out my windows in February and see flowers blooming. The geraniums in the boxes on my bedroom balcony have flowers all year long.
I chose Buffalo as the setting because I wanted my heroine to be out of her element. She goes north from Birmingham Alabama to work. I also wanted to set the story in the house my great grandfather owned in in Buffalo before the stock market crash in 1929. I remember stories my aunt and father used to tell about going to Sunday dinners as children in this wondrous big house their grandfather lived in before he lost his fortune.
The house is no longer there, and my dad is gone, but the memories are still so clear for my aunt, and I’d like to honor those memories in a small way.
Usually I pick a location I know for a book, or if I need specifics I can’t find, I make up a location. This is the best of all--seeing it through the eyes of one of my very favorite relatives!
I hate the way I let mundane, every day life distract me from my writing. I work in the morning--it seems to be the only time I am really creative. I have friends who don’t start writing until nine or ten at night. By that time I’m in my P. J’s, curled up in a chair reading and totally useless in the creative department.
So why do I waste my creative time? I decided this morning we needed to have Fajitas for dinner, so I had to run out to the market. Who thinks about Mexican food at eight AM? Sheesh.
I’d like to tell you the reason I’m distracted is because I’m setting my own deadline and not following one from a publisher, but I did this kind of thing all the time when I was publishing for New York houses. And now that I think of it, it usually had to do with food.
It is so much easier to plan and cook a great meal than it is to write five pages of a manuscript.
Okay--Back to writing! As soon as I check email. And get a cup of coffee. And a snack. :-)
Okay, I’m 11,823 words into the first draft of my manuscript and I’m having the same doubts I have with every book. The characters have too many flaws to be likable and there is not enough conflict. It happens every time I start a new book. My writing process is to plot--which I do with a group of three other trusted published writers. We met in a writing class for unpublished writers a long time ago, and we all clicked.
The first book I wrote was done without plotting--what we call the ‘pantster‘ method, i.e. by-the-seat-of-the-pants, but it took me five years to write that book and I wanted to be more prolific than that, so I took up plotting.
I try to write straight through a rough draft, on the theory that you can’t revise what you haven’t written.
I can only hope that, like my last eight books, I’ll take a look at this first draft and think ‘Hey--it’s not nearly as bad as I thought’.
Then I start to rewrite. I like to rewrite. It is so much less painful :-)
This blogging thing is harder than I thought it would be. Of course I’m using a computer instead of a typewriter for my first blog, but I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Funny, really, that I’m more intimidated by a blog of a few paragraphs than I am by working on my ninth novel that will probably run at least 60,000 words.
It finally occurred to me that my problem is a lot like the Hollywood actors that claim to be basically shy people. They say they don’t have a problem acting because they are playing someone else. When I’m writing, I’m a little like the actor playing a part. I’m creating fiction. A blog is about me, about my feelings.
Up until now, I’ve gone the traditional publishing route--write a proposal, submit it to an editor at a New York publishing house and wait for a response. I made the decision to try something new. I have the rights back to my first three books, and I’m going to release them to the digital world. Two are historical romances and one is a contemporary.
I switched from historical to contemporary romance when the historical market got soft, but the past is where my heart is. After sixteen years of publishing, I decided to follow my heart. Lucky for me, the rapid growth of digital publishing will allow for the, I hope, easy transition.
I hope you’re interested in following my journey.
